Page 116 of Full Mountie

Her face falls. “Oh.”

“Wherever he is, he planned this.” That’s hard to say. I thought after the last two months we were all in the same place, on the same page, but I’m realizing with bitter distaste that I had no clue what was going on his head.

Not the first time I’ve been blindsided by him, though.

I’m a sucker for thinking this time would be different.

It was different, though. We had Beth.

Have.

We have Beth.

She hasn’t said anything. She’s peeling the label off the beer bottle tiny piece by tiny piece. I take a drink and look at her anew, too.

“This isn’t what you wanted, is it?” God, those words feel clumsy and wrong in my mouth.

She jerks her head up, her eyes wide and alarmed. “No.”

“I think we need to do a better job of saying things.”

She laughs weakly. “Yeah. Probably.”

“What are you thinking?”

She presses her lips together and shakes her head.

I lean forward and brace my forearms on my thighs. “I want you both. Maybe we need to start there. Was that not clear? Is that not okay?”

“It’s more than okay,” she whispers. “But I don’t know how clear it was.”

“Not even after last night?” Or any of the nights that came before it? All my muscles tense and flex as the heat under my collar slides down my spine.

“It was the wedding.” She tips her bottle of beer back and drains it. Then she stands and starts pacing. “We had a conversation while we were dancing. And I didn’t get it at the time…”

“Get what? Damn it, spit it out.”

She holds up her hand, her forehead tight. “Please don’t push. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say. Okay? I don’t know your entire history. You two have been super cagey about that. So don’t expect me to hand you the answer on a platter. I don’t have it.”

Shit. I nod. “Right. I’m sorry.”

She shrugs. “I freaked out earlier. I’m glad we’re taking turns.” She does another pace of the living room, then stops and gives another small shrug. “Okay. So Hugh told me a little about how you first hooked up. How you’d just broken up with a woman…?”

I nod. Even after all these years, the hot, weird mix of guilt and excitement in my veins is a feeling I’ll always associate with those early days before Hugh kissed me.

“I think he thinks that meant more to him than it did to you.” She says it softly, but the words are fists, fast like lightning.

He’s not wrong.

And he’s completely wrong, but that’s a secret I’ve buried deep, and I thought…

Well, I’d thought wrong. Turns out it’s not that easy to move forward as if the past weren’t ugly.

“And the wedding stirred that up. We may have given him the impression that…” She groans and tips her head back. “Fuck. This is so weird to talk about when we’ve only been dating for a little while.” She looks at me and winces. “Don’t read too much into this, but I’d been thinking about you and me—and Hugh and me, and Hugh and you—yesterday. And he saw that. It was hard to hide.”

There’s a side-note of insecurity that we’re going to have to come back to in a minute.Don’t read too much into it.Jesus. But I want to get to the bottom of this first. “Sure. It’s hard to go to something like that and think, I want that, and it’s out of reach.”

“Do you want that?”

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